Wonderland.
It was a children’s garden and, like a deserted playground, it felt lonely. While summer was in bloom everywhere else in Wisteria, these flower beds had only the headless stalks and papery leaves of dead spring flowers. I walked the garden paths, pausing to study the rabbit and the cat. Rabbit and cat! Amazed at finding the place that had figured in my O.B.E., I had momentarily forgotten about Joanna’s words: The snake slides past a rabbit, glides past a cat. The images she had “seen” could have been drawn from here. Topiary gardens, requiring years of pruning to create, were maintained for decades and longer.
It was possible that this garden had been kept by Mick Sanchez.
Walking the perimeter of the garden with Joanna’s images swirling in my mind, I tripped. A hose had been left out, a long rubber snake with a metal head pointing to the gazebo. I turned and strolled toward the wooden structure.
The gazebo had been designed like a child’s playhouse.
Four of its six sides had windows with shutters, each shutter carved with a heart. The other two sides, one facing the house, and its opposite, facing the entrance through the hedge, had doorways with a carved heart above each of them. I mounted the four steps up to the gazebo and stood inside, pivoting slowly, looking out at the garden. From this focal point, the pattern formed by each quadrant of dried stalks became clear: hearts.
Child-size chairs were pushed over to one side of the structure. I glanced down, then clicked on my flashlight to survey the floor. A film of dirt and pollen covered the portion facing the house, but the section facing the door in the hedge, and the steps down from it, had been washed clean.
I was about to turn off my light when I noticed a deep groove in the wood flooring. I traced it: a square, a door to storage beneath the gazebo. Was this my “rabbit hole,” part of myand Uncle Will’s — route to the fire site?
It was easy to imagine a murder scenario: Uncle Will holding his fishing rod, gazing peacefully at the pond, struck on the back of the head by someone he never saw coming; Uncle Will being dragged from the pond, through the hedge, past the topiary rabbit; Uncle Will’s body stored beneath the gazebo, the murderer waiting for a way to dispose of it. I figured that the hose had been used to wash down the bloody track left behind.
Although I had followed the path of Uncle Will’s murder during my O.B.E., I didn’t think I had actually been present at his death. I would have sensed someone else on the paths of this garden, the way I had sensed the crowd on the night of the fire. Somehow, for some reason, Uncle Will chose to lead me along the path he had traveled from his death to the fire. I gazed down at the door to the storage area. There could be evidence here: hair, threads from clothing, a weapon, somthing. I knelt down. Feeling around the edge of the door, I found an indentation that allowed me to slip my fingers under the boards and lift.
I stared in horror. The beam of my flashlight illuminated the lower end of a leg. The victim’s foot was bare, the skin pale and splotchy. My stomach heaved, and I thought I was going to throw up. Then the foot moved.
“AUNT IRIS. WHAT are you doing in there?”
She slowly shifted position, her face edging out of the shadow created by the gazebo’s flooring. “Get in.”
“No way,” I said.
“You must get in.”
She reached up to grasp my arm. I pulled back.
“You must do what I say.”
“I won’t.”
I shone my light into the dark hole, but I couldn’t tell how big it was or what it contained. Aunt Iris’s eyes shone back at me with a peculiar light. I wasn’t sure if I was gazing into the eyes of a psychic or a madwoman. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be the next one to die.
“Then you must get in, Anna.”
She’d spoken as if she had heard my thoughts, and she had called me Anna. The floodlights, which I had triggered earlier and which had begun to dim, suddenly flashed on again. Someone else is here, I thought.
Iris gripped my arms, pulling with all her strength. “If harm comes to you, William will never forgive me. Get in!”
The floodlights went off quickly, not fading, the way they had before. There was no time to reason through the situation. I climbed into the hole with her and lowered the door.
The area beneath the gazebo was about three feet deep and appeared to extend to the edges of the structure.
“Put out your light,” Aunt Iris said. “It’ll shine through the cracks.”
I did so with great reluctance. The moist earth smelled strong, a mix of something cloyingly sweet — mulch, I thought — and something rotten that I couldn’t identify.
Aunt Iris heard me sniffing. “What do you smell?”
“I–I don’t know. It’s cold in here.”
“He can’t help it.”
I did not find it reassuring that she believed Uncle Will was in there with us. After all that had happened, I was no longer certain that only the things I saw existed. I sat hunched, the wetness of the earth seeping through my shorts. When I rested my hands on the dirt beneath me, it felt sticky. Blood-soaked, I thought.
“His blood has dried,” Aunt Iris assured me.
“Dried here?”
“Yes. Be quiet. She’s coming.”
“Who?”
“Quiet!”
My ears strained to hear something. Minutes ticked by.
No one came. Still, something was going on with the outside lights.
“Aunt Iris, why are you hiding in here?” I whispered.
“I don’t exactly know.”
Oh, great, I thought.
“I knew I had to come here, just as you and she had to come here, but I don’t know which one of us is drawing the other two.”
I repeated her words in my head, trying to tease out their meaning.
“Anna?” The voice came from beyond the gazebo, from the direction of the house. “Anna, where are you? Are you all right?”
Breathing a sigh of relief, I pressed my fingertips against the boards above us to open the door. Aunt Iris’s powerful hands grasped mine and pulled them down.
“It’s Marcy,” I said.
“Of course it is!” she hissed.
“But—” I stopped. My aunt’s tone of voice was that of a frustrated teacher speaking to a student who was slow to catch on. I struggled to piece together events.
I had left a note for Zack. Marcy had probably read it. She considered me her responsibility. She probably had keys to the property, knew the gate code, and — no, wait — I hadn’t told Zack I was coming here. I hadn’t even mentioned borrowing the boat.
“She’ll look in here,” Iris whispered. “Push back as far as you can from the opening. I’ll go out and talk to her.”
I heard footsteps on the gravel. Marcy was approaching the gazebo, walking more slowly as she drew closer. Aunt Iris gave me a final shove with her bare foot, raised the trapdoor, and climbed out.
“Well, look who it is.” Marcy’s voice had a strange flatness to it; I couldn’t tell if she was surprised.
“Hello, Marcy. I was expecting you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Same thing as you are,” Aunt Iris replied.
“I don’t think so.”
“Cleaning up,” Aunt Iris went on. “You’ve been sloppy, leaving the hose out, washing only half the gazebo floor. I hope you properly disposed of the weapon.”
“I did.”
